Posts tagged as:

Garner

MIDNIGHT: technically, twelve o’clock a.m.

December 31, 2011

Midnight is one of those words that was created to describe something literally.  Its literal meaning is “middle of the night.”  If that seems strange to you at all, it may be because 12:oo a.m. is hardly the middle of a contemporary night. I suppose that in the century in which the word originated it [...]

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PROTEIN: any of numerous, highly varied organic molecules constituting a large portion of the mass of every life form and necessary in the diet of all animals and other non-photosythesizing life forms*

September 25, 2011

STOP!  Don’t click off, thinking this is going to be a boring science posting.   I only use the definition and the illustration to be clear about what the word means.   That’s not the purpose of this posting. Rather, I want to share a dispute that floats around my family about the way that I pronounce [...]

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GOVERNANCE: a system of oversight

December 26, 2010

There are some who believe that “getting elected” or “winning an election” is all that it takes to become the head of a country, state or municipality.   If we were to live by that belief we would be placing the craft of politics at the top of the ladder … and we would be missing [...]

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ORIENTATE: a form of “orient”: to face east

September 3, 2010

For years I have rejected the word orientate as being just a sloppy way of pronouncing the word “orient.” It seemed to me that the word orientate was another one of those words that comes down to us through its use in the military. However, I was surprised to discover that the dictionaries I consult [...]

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INFER: to derive by reasoning

June 22, 2010

Like many people, I have been known to confuse the word infer with the word imply.   While they are related in their context, they are two different words, with two different meanings.  It came home to me yesterday when I heard a person on a news show say, “I meant to infer that he was [...]

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DRUG: to have dragged something across the floor

February 17, 2010

It must be a huge, complex enterprise to try to learn American English as a second language. We, for whom American English is our natural tongue, take for granted the complexities of the language, overlooking the myriad of exceptions and mis-conceptions which lace themselves through everyday speech. I stumbled across this thought yesterday when I [...]

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